How AI is shaping the Medtech industry – Interview with Professor Wei Dongqing from Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Mr. Wei Dongqing is a professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Physics and Chemistry at the School of Life Sciences of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has excelled in applying Machine Learning and modern AI into solving complex problems in life sciences. We at Aqsens Health had the opportunity to interview Professor Wei to discuss how AI is shaping the future of the healthcare industry ahead of Aqsens and Shanghai Jiao Tong University's research collaboration.
What research topics are you interested in? What do your research group’s studies focus on?
Our research is related to the area we previously called computer-aided drug design. Nowadays, we usually refer to this area as AI-aided drug design. So, this involves computer simulations – the technique is called molecular dynamics simulation. We also apply machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence to build models and train them so that they are able to predict, for example, drug target interactions.
In addition to this, we also work on an area called biomedical big data. We apply the latest AI technology to process large amounts of biological data, such as multi-omics data. We integrate all this data to build models and train them, so that they can be used to predict various biological conditions, also in the area of medical devices and diagnostics, like what Aqsens Health develops.
So that is quite efficient and useful. Our goal is to gather and process data, so that it can become useful in biomedical research and services.
What are the current challenges in implementing AI into medtech?
One of the major challenges is that the data comes from multiple sources. For example from images, omics data, text, and information from clinicians. We have to be able to integrate all this information into a model that can be used in practice. We try to transform this data into a knowledge graph.
To have a good predictive AI model it is important to have new data sources which are reliable and complementary to existing data. In that area we are very interested in working with Aqsens Health and their E-TRF method and biosensors.
I think there is still quite a long way to go in applying AI fully into the medical field, so research teams like ours have to work together with companies like Aqsens so that we can build the best models to serve the industry.
What do you think are the most important contributions AI could make in healthcare in the future?
I already touched on a part of this before, but I believe that if we can find a way to deal with a large amount of data from various sources and integrate it into a knowledge graph and have well trained models that can handle this large amount of data, we can use it in diagnostics.
With the rate AI is currently developing, I believe that we are not far from having more AI applications in diagnostics. I think all areas of healthcare will benefit from this approach to diagnostics. Hopefully, our collaboration will help make great progress in applying new methodologies and AI into healthcare and diagnostics.
We want to thank Professor Wei for answering our questions, and we look forward to our collaboration!
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